s u m m e r
bitter
Places take on a new meaning in my mind once I've been away from them for awhile. The smells are hard to remember and I don't trust my interpretation of them. They seem exaggerated because I've nothing tangible to go on anymore and the uncertainty only adds to the distortion. It has now been two years since I've last stepped onto the land that was once my families and now belongs to some strangers from New York.
Two years since I vacated the place I called home, where I first walked, first swam, first felt the slick scales of a pan fish and the stick of the barbs running down its back.
When I think of the smell of wet screen during a summer storm, it is that front porch I recall first. The reclined chairs with heavy wooden arms and soft cushions against my skin, mist against my face. Lightning striking the lake and the sharp crack of thunder echoing through the cove so sudden you can feel it in your teeth.
I've not tried to recall those things.
I took it for granted they would be a part of me forever because accepting that they could well fade would mean accepting that I, the holder of these things, the keeper of my families history, would also become a fabricator and that things once as real to me as the hot breath in my mouth would become fiction.
Unconfirmable.
So that is where the story truly begins, after the end.
There is no way for me to prove or disprove what I relate with regard to my past in that place, in that time.
It used to be I could tell you from the cuts on my feet I'd been busy on the boat ramp that day. When I tossed a handful of slate gray arrowheads into a bowl on the table inside the front door, you'd know I'd been for a walk along the shore, that it was Winter and the water low.
If I had red skin and dirt under my nails you knew I'd been fishing and dug for worms and you could tell from the odor if I'd caught anything. If I had the .410 broke down across my knee you'd have known I shot a snake, and if you heard tires on gravel and tasted dust as you walked through the backdoor, you'd know I brought you the evening paper.
Now all these things are fractured pieces of what used to make a whole. They are good for parting out like an old rusty car on blocks.
They are fleeting.
They are fading.
They are, memories.
goodnight 5.24.07